AIDS, Art, and Activism; capturing queer life through crisis

Zoe Leonard’s Strange Fruit (1992-97) is a manifestation of this mourning process – of a loss of friends, of family, and of a community fraught by devastation –as Zoe explores grief through her artistic creations. Nan Goldin, similarly, captures the trauma brought by AIDS via the personal, humanising the disease via her artwork Cookie in Her Casket and as the curator of Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing. In the latter, Nan displayed positive images of sexuality to counter the apathetical political response and government censorship during the crisis.

Below, we will explore how these artists navigate the stages of grief; how they use their personal stories and experiences – of life and death – to evoke a political message and elicit an emotional response from the viewer. We will examine how, during the midst of the AIDS crisis, these works combated systemic apathy and a homophobic media landscape, utilising the commonality of human struggles, our fight for existence, and the joy of community solidarity.

Zoe Leonard: Strange Fruit

Consisting of the skins of three hundred or so consumed fruits – bananas, oranges, grapefruits, and lemons – stitched back together by Zoe, with saturated wire and thread, Strange Fruit (1992-97), is a deeply personal piece which deals with Zoe’s trauma in losing many of her friends to AIDS. It is an ephemeral work, invoking our relationship to the deceased – and to the process of grief – as the never ceasing procession of time consumes. The act of repairing, of sewing back together, trying to mend what is gone, clinging onto our memories of what remains; as Zoe (1997) herself remarks ‘[…] these skins are no longer the fruit itself, but a form reminiscent of the original. You pay homage to what remains.’ Yet this endeavour is futile; as time proceeds our memories grow hazy – we forget as ‘elements wear down in time’. This rotting of the fruit skins, as they slowly disintegrate, represents the present turning into the past as we slowly drift onward to the future.

While Strange Fruit was a personal project for Zoe, its presence within exhibitions gave onlookers a view into the scale of the trauma produced by the epidemic – transforming Zoe’s personal procession of mourning into a public display of grieving. Zoe later remarked that this work was not an activist piece; Strange Fruit, instead, gives a visual representation of the magnitude behind the figures of the epidemic. Hundreds of skins lay hollow, decaying, exuding the devastation left in the wake of AIDS. The melancholic beauty of Strange Fruit imbues it with the pathos of human experience, which anyone faced with the wrath of loss can identify with. Through this commonality, compassion and empathy for those lost during the AIDS epidemic blossoms.

Nan Goldin: The Cookie Portfolio and Witnesses: Against our Vanishing

‘And somehow, I thought photographing people enough would keep them alive. But it showed me what I had lost.’(3)

Nan Goldin maintained the deeply personal nature of her oeuvre throughout the AIDS crisis. In her work, Nan invites the viewer into a familial(4) space, exploring nuanced relationships amid public and private spheres.

The Cookie Portfolio is a set of 15 images of Nan’s friend Dorothy ‘Cookie’ Mueller. The portfolio displays the life of Cookie, her animated personality and demeanour, throughout the bars and nightclubs of New York’s Lower East Side. Taken from 1976 until 1989, when Cookie died due to AIDS related complications, the portfolio is marked by its final sombre image, Cookie in Her Casket. Among a bed of flowers, her body adorned with jewellery and her hair uncharacteristically combed, we see Cookie laid to rest within a satin casket; the image is dim, amber light illuminating the cross upon her chest. This deeply intimate moment humanises Cookie, preventing her from becoming a statistic or headline. As Lauren Barnett proposes, ‘[Cookie] is not a distanced AIDS victim, to be feared or isolated, but a deceased loved one, cared for by her family of friends’(5).

This care informs Witnesses: Against our Vanishing. In 1989, asked by ARTISTS SPACE to curate a show, Nan collated a plethora of art – from photography to drawings, sculptures to paintings – created by her friends; each work constituted a reflection by each artist on their relationship with the AIDS crisis(6) . Through Witnesses, Nan curated an exhibition that does not cower in the face of AIDS; it is a formal goodbye to loved ones lost, a processing of grief, and a celebration of Queer identity. It portrays sexuality as a ‘positive force’, ‘prov[ing] that sex=death’ is a factual inaccuracy and that the Queer community ‘will not vanish’ in the face of censorship and apathy . Underscored by the death of some of its contributors, Witnesses acted as a reminder of the reality of the AIDS crisis.

Both Cookie in Her Casket and Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing present, to a non-Queer audience, the humanity of Queer life and the universality of mortality. Nan is not just as an observer; she is not above her subjects, but alongside them as the work ‘comes out of [her] life’ . In the same way, Cookie in Her Casket invokes our own relationships to those we hold dear; meanwhile, Witnesses brings bystanders into the foray of Queer life, humanising an abstracted other. Collectively, these works rebel against Queer erasure, cementing that we exist and reclaiming compassion from horror .

Conclusion

Nan and Zoe’s elicitation of their own lived reality, and the experiences of the Queer community by extension, evoke a connection which is fundamentally human. While each piece of work – Strange Fruit, Cookie in Her Casket, and Witnesses: Against our Vanishing – is not explicitly activist in nature, each invokes a political message. They make the personal political, conveying frustration towards cold, medicalised rhetoric and an uncaring, disengaged government. Here, art forms a clarion call for understanding, compassion, and change.

Strange Fruit invokes a relatable relationship to grief and the complications of its many stages. Cookie in Her Casket humanises the alienated victims of AIDS and transforms them from a feared, foreign concept into a real person – someone who existed, who had friends, who loved and was loved. Witnesses: Against our Vanishing completes the crescendo, bringing together death, grief, love, and joy. Nan, Zoe, and the artists of Witnesses enrapture the viewer, challenging preconceived notions of Queer life and affirming the respect and support the Queer community deserves.

By Emery